


Fleshly Concerns

by oysterpearl (willowbilly)



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Biting, Cock Warming, Coping Mechanisms, Dark Crozier, Dissociation, Dom/sub, Drunk Sex, Episode: s01e06 A Mercy, Erectile Dysfunction, Fight? Flight? FREEZE, Forced Orgasm, Implied/Referenced Self-Medication, Implied/Referenced Sex Pollen, Internal Conflict, Internalized Victim Blaming, Light Masochism, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Moral Ambiguity, Mutineer Era (The Terror), Nipple Play, Non-Consensual Intimacy, Oral Sex, Panic Attacks, Period-Typical Homophobia, Power Imbalance, Rape Aftermath, Relapsing, Sex as Coping Mechanism, Sexual Dysfunction, Shame, Silence/Compliance Is Not Consent, Trauma Disclosure, Unresolved Trauma, begins in—, ends in—
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:08:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29968233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/oysterpearl
Summary: Beneath a thorny ghost of rosewater the man smells sickly, musky. A dying stag in a rut. Sweat has soaked through the neck of his undershirt, plastering the linen to his chest. That shirt and his boots are all the things he is wearing, and Goodsir feels a frisson of shame, as thoughheis the one exposed, and wanting.What is unsaid goes unheard, and Goodsir pays a price.
Relationships: Francis Crozier/Harry D. S. Goodsir
Kudos: 9





	Fleshly Concerns

**Author's Note:**

> Me, casting around myself for someplace nice and suitable on which to set my Clinical Aversion to Intimacy:

There was a bottle, cached and then forgotten, of gin. That's all that Goodsir can quite gather as being the catalyst behind the captain's horrific funny fit, this of which he's so unfortunately interrupted—gathered, for the main part, not through any cogent explanation from the inconsolable Cpt. Crozier, but by the flavor of his mouth, when it is with a kiss that Goodsir's questions are forestalled: alcohol and juniper berries, at first so strong as to overpower rancid breath and the trace notes of bitter mystery herbs; his captain's tongue, thick and slick as it is shoved into his own mouth; the saline tang of his captain's tears.

 _“Sir,”_ Goodsir gasps out. Crozier's tongue interrupts him again, the muscular intrusion plunging deep past Goodsir's teeth as though for his throat, curling up short against his hard palate, licking around his premolars to the insides of his cheeks. Goodsir thrashes his head to the side, spluttering, to try and dislodge him, to keep himself from biting at the other man's tongue, and Crozier _is_ dislodged, only for him to then smash together their mouths and seize Goodsir's lower lip between his teeth in so harsh a bite Goodsir tastes blood.

His little whimper of pain appears to shock Crozier into brief sensibility, or at least causes his incisors to part and his head rear away that he may look Goodsir in the face where he has Goodsir pinned against the door. Crozier's own face is brilliant red, dripping wet, and is transformed into an unrecognizable snarl of desperation, his watering eyes black with lust and self-loathing. His whole body is ashake from the sheer force of thae his silent sobs. He's leaning his weight onto Goodsir as though incapable of supporting himself, but the hands gripping Goodsir's upper arms to keep him in place do so with bruising strength, and this grip tightens when Goodsir dares test it.

Beneath a thorny ghost of rosewater the man smells sickly, musky. A dying stag in a rut. Sweat has soaked through the neck of his undershirt, plastering the linen to his chest. That shirt and his boots are all the things he is wearing, and Goodsir feels a frisson of shame, as though _he_ is the one exposed, and wanting.

“Sir,” Goodsir says again. Crozier's hazy focus sharpens upon Goodsir's mouth as Goodsir licks his lips with a wince and speaks, fast and soft, afeared of drawing attention outwith the room; within it he averts his gaze from Crozier's for the same fear's sake, longing with all his racing heart only to be gone. “Is there something the matter, sir?”

Crozier moans like the question is so foolish it _hurts_ him, slumping heavily forward to press his wet face against Goodsir's neck. There, he mumbles something about his father drinking gin, how only his father drank gin. How he'd rather the bullet than go on like this. _Please, please,_ he rasps. _My G-ddamned pistol's with the Lieutenant,_ O G-d, _damn me, please._

Goodsir shivers at Crozier's booze-laden breath and the scalding trickle of tears against his throat, at the despair so vitriolic he wonders why he cannot call for help escaping it, for Jopson or M'Donald or for whomsoever _would_ to come to his aid, to take Crozier in hand and save them from this. Another low, hoarse moan resonates from Crozier through the whole of Goodsir's awfully attuned body, and he shivers harder, humiliation prickling in his blood as he fails to dismiss the hardening of his prick against the pressure of Crozier's encroaching thigh, the reaction only exacerbated by his own shame and terror.

There is no space in which for Goodsir to back away. He attempts to wriggle out of Crozier's hands, startled into another whimper at the sharp pinch of teeth on his throat. Crozier does not let him go, but does relinquish Goodsir's biceps in favor of scrabbling at his clothes: tugging off the neckerchief, spreading open coat and waistcoat and pushing up the guernsey over shirts thence spread alike to reveal Goodsir's flat, hairy bosom. Goodsir has his own ineffectual hands on Crozier, meaning to push him off but for the hot sting of warning that is Crozier's mouth, latched as tightly onto him as would adhere a mollusk foot to rock, sucking at the skin of his throat and of his clavicles.

 _Nobody_ should come in right now. They cannot be caught like this.

Goodsir pants for air with his head tilted upward to allow his neck be savaged and quietly _panics_ within at the thought of himself being witnessed in such an incriminating state, of others seeing him as a part of this, as desiring of it; he flinches so much that he knocks the back of his head against the door when Crozier's teeth unexpectedly close over one of his _areolae._ He lets Crozier go so as to muffle himself with his hand, flinging the other out behind himself as he grasps for purchase.

“Easy, easy lad,” says Crozier, in a husky tone of raw gratitude that sets Goodsir's upset stomach further aflutter. He strokes across Goodsir's ribs and scratches his fingernails through the dark curls of Goodsir's thick chest hair before squeezing one of Goodsir's modest breasts. He pushes it as far upward on Goodsir's chest as possible, leans in, and _bites_ that areola with even more famished a cruelty than he'd the other.

The pain pulses bright, reverberating deliciously through his flesh, and is chased by the soothing heat and velvety softness of Crozier _suckling_ him there, and of Crozier's tongue, lapping at him wherever it so is that he is thusly made sore.

Goodsir twists and whines, steadying himself by way of spreading both arms with his hands turned flat against the door to the Great Cabin. His jaw falls agape upon being bitten again. Being nipped and licked over and over. He opens his throat and gulps for breath lest he wail aloud or otherwise choke too loudly on his own noise, his eyes finding the dark prism of the illuminator in the ceiling's gloom above.

It is all happening too quickly by far. He's no chance to recollect himself, to choose, or think of what he might say that could put a stop to this.

Crozier's face smears across Goodsir's chest, fewer tears and more saliva, more copious perspiration, the air popping cold and hot against Goodsir's skin as Crozier breathes, snuffling into the softness of Goodsir's drenched body hair and groaning between lecherous bites. The man's palm is sweaty as it fumbles its way through the fly front of Goodsir's threadful old trousers and down into his linens, finding and tightly curling itself with clumsy greed about his throbbing stand; Goodsir cringes bodily, his head falling forward on his neck so that he shan't bump the berth's partition, chin on heaving chest—; helpless. Except to watch.

Apparent resistance dispensed with, Crozier must presume to have Goodsir's permission, or perhaps he cares presume nothing of Goodsir other than his body's pleasure, with which it is indeed racked. Kissing and gnawing on Goodsir's breasts, he draws Goodsir's stiff, dribbling member from his fly and into the chill; warms it enfolded within his fist as he carefully lowers himself to kneel before the thing thereupon to gag himself without ado.

Goodsir _just_ holds back a shout.

Even now, with Crozier doing _this_ to him, in the back of his mind Goodsir cannot but worry: at discovery; for Crozier's poor old knees.

 _“C-c-captain—,”_ he tries, whispering what of the title he can, still wishing wholly for it to cease.

But that youthful stutter of his arises to kill any and all verbal abilities dead in his throat, for the sensation of another person's mouth fellating Goodsir's own prick is so overwhelming, so debilitating. It's as if he were dealt a wound. A physical injury.

He tries to distance himself from it. To stand against the door with the frigidity of drying saliva on his exposed skin, and to think of anything else, and, in this fashion, he allows his crisis take him.

* * *

Afterward, Goodsir waits, but Crozier seems satisfied merely having extracted that of which he has already. At some point he tires of orally wringing all spend from Goodsir's prick with such intent brutality, and gradually relents, until he is for the most part only nuzzling, sloppy and open-mouthed, at Goodsir's oversensitized flesh.

“Sir,” Goodsir croaks, his mouth dry, his esophagus tight as it would be before the shedding of tears; at least Crozier is no longer in hysterics. “Let me go, sir? Let me go.” He hovers a trembling hand atop Crozier's head, cold beneath the man's breath, his teeth, his acts without sanction.

The captain mutters something that is much too slurred for Goodsir to understand. Finally does he remove his terrible mouth, and rests his forehead upon Goodsir's leg, as heavily as how Goodsir leans, weak-of-knee, against the door through which he'd not escaped.

The tremors worsen as Goodsir puts himself away and does up his buttons. He might have thought Crozier asleep, were he not rocking his face against Goodsir's thigh and still releasing an occasional hiccup of anguish, the damp heat of him seeping through the cloth of Goodsir's trousers. Goodsir gently extricates himself and further straightens out his clothes before he shakily helps Crozier into bed.

Crozier grabs his wrist as he turns to leave, and his heart leaps with dread. But Crozier only thanks him, the small, cracked words muffled by his pillow.

He stays there as Crozier passes out. Sets himself on the floor in the farthest corner and sits with his coat pulled close around his body as it shakes itself to exhaustion, listening to the other's sleeping breath. Breathes, until he is himself still, and too numb, too cold, to shiver anymore.

* * *

How could such a thing have happened?

For every day afterward Goodsir is plagued by that question.

Why, he wonders, had he gone to check in on the captain? Let alone on his own. There had been no need for Goodsir to visit him; Drs. Peddie and M'Donald were more than capable of seeing Crozier through the agonies of substance withdrawal, and Stanley had privately scoffed at Goodsir's suggestion of offering consult or assistance. There'd been no substantive reason for his being there at all.

But for what reason did the captain avail himself of _Goodsir_ in such a manner? Would he have carnally accosted _any_ visitor who was so foolish as to step over his threshold, or had Goodsir somehow made for a more appropriate target? A softer, more appealing creature, that would bow beneath the whims of another's will.

Was he taken, _so easily,_ as a victim?

It hurts more— _confuses_ him, more, that Crozier had been someone he'd trusted. Had a different member of the crew done this, Goodsir might even have gone to Crozier in the aftermath, believing him a man of justice. Believing him to be other than a potential threat unto his lonesome person. To expose the issue now, though, would be a greater threat yet to the expedition's survival overall. The men's morale sinks successively lower at each turn, and for them to know of this might cause what scant faith that did remain between them and Command to shatter utterly, hence dooming them all to a mutiny or its destructive like.

He cannot confide in anyone, either. Carnivale dispatches M'Donald, from whom Goodsir could have most expected a physician's understanding tact, and the prospect of sharing such a secret with someone else, with one who might prefer to ask Crozier for his own version of events rather than suspend skepticism simply so that Goodsir could find validation in the telling of what disturbed him, sends Goodsir's mind spiraling into a dark pit of apprehension predominated therein by impromptu court martials and the clawings of nine-tailed cats.

Look what humiliation had befallen Hickey, the guilty; see what censure could ensue were Goodsir's word to challenge that which must be taken as infallible. Better to dose himself into calm at the onset of the nightmares and to write out his frustrations within the spare pages of a journal. Sepia ink smudging underhand as the script stains itself, frantic, and vague, across the paper.

If only he'd stayed on _Erebus_ that evening. If only he'd not putten himself in such a position as for it ever to have _occurred.  
_

He's careful from thereon to avoid situations in which he is alone with another man but for those of utmost necessity. Standing up to Stanley regarding the poisoned tins tests his resolve; watching him immolate burns it to ash. When Collins grabs him up, weeping in fear, crushing him close, it is good the mate's embrace is too sudden for Goodsir to react outwardly, for he would perhaps break the poor man were he to have fled him in his repulsion.

Collins sobs in the way that Goodsir has imagined doing so for himself. He holds Goodsir until he has cried himself dry and sorry, and Goodsir makes noises of reassurance, of promises and hope, and then on that very night he makes steel his nerves and goes to Crozier to urge that hunting parties be assembled.

In sobriety, Crozier has become practically a separate person from that of himself as he'd been when in the depths of his cups. Also dry, and sorry.

“We share a burden, you and I,” he says to Goodsir, chafing warmth back into his stockinged feet. “Keeping this.”

In his acute disappointment, Goodsir nonetheless realizes that Crozier has made of Goodsir himself a confidante, in the like that Goodsir daren't of anyone. He realizes that Crozier does not remember their encounter as his own self so does.

It had not been nothing to Crozier, but he looks upon Goodsir without any of the conflict from it that wages within him; none of the smothered, patronizing instinct toward detestable hatred. He is succorous, having a generous gravity to himself that threatens to pull one in, what with its freshly artificed face of unthreat.

It hadn't been an act of malice that took place, but of mistake. A misunderstanding.

This should have rendered it painless, given that it had not been meant to violate. This should make it all well again.

So why does this fact weigh on Goodsir so? Why make the wound, that of distrust, and despondency, and that of his disconnect from meaningful self both body and soul, only grow?

It shouldn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't.

The supper bell rings and Goodsir goes to prevent Lady Silence's partaking.

* * *

Morfin dies; killed by rifle after the ricochet from his misfiring. Another horrible accident that no prescription of Dover's powder or wine of coca can possibly cure. More blood spilled all so as to stake a claim to these other lands and waters and lives for the Empire. And for what? Where is the good in any of this?

Vast emotion swells in him as he regards the gore darkening the shale, Crozier speaking as though far distant. The accident itself may have been unavoidable, but the rest was as predicted, as Collins feared, as Jacko previously experienced: no fresh meat means madness following. Morfin's corpse is testament of fate enough despite Goodsir's best attempts to stave it off. He shrugs away a friendly touch and just makes away back to his own tent before the fit of tremors hits him.

She comes to him, then: Silence slipping through the entrance after him, one of the Navy's thin woolen blankets wrapped over her shoulders, eyes for a moment on his in the low golden light and the night large behind her. Could Goodsir ask her why she bothered to come, or could he have ordered her away, he would have. But he can only watch as she approaches him, lying helpless before her, shaking himself apart.

He is fallen already in expectation of the worst, and so his fears clamor to interpose themselves between himself and Silence, to protect himself from her. It must hurt less if he expects pain. If he expects that anyone coming to him bodes violation. That might only somehow be fair, for the fears to which _she'd_ been exposed, but of course it is not what Silence does.

Light of step, silent as her appellation, she says nothing—he forgets, although he had examined the damage freshly done, taken note of the stump perhaps cauterized with seal oil: tongue cut short by way of her own steady hand; her own ulu blade. She lays herself at his back as he lies hyperventilating, the blanket, but not her body, touching him—not until her hand clasps his upper arm.

With all his quivering, the flinch at contact is camouflaged. Still nothing is said: he does not actually want for her to leave.

No sooner has Silence taken careful hold of him than is it inexplicably possible for Goodsir to breathe with less of such labor. His diaphragm flexes; his lungs inflate; air rushes through his blood and first his head becomes light, thence in increments, his heart.

After a long time, he even finds words to say. Whispers them into the dark wherein Silence listens. He barely recalls the exact content of those things he confesses to her, upon his waking the next morn. His journal along with its copious rough dictionary notes is gone missing, so he cannot make note of that which he does; only remembers telling her, voice a painful, waning thread, of his feelings toward Crozier.

“I forgive him so terribly,” he said. He'd giggled from the exhaustion.

She squeezed his arm so tightly that her nails just barely bit, and, from behind himself, he could hear her: weeping.

* * *

“Francis,” he says, and feels the faintest spark of surprise within himself at the surprise in Crozier of Goodsir's calling him by his Christian name.

What might _he_ have felt, when like a drowning man he'd seized on Goodsir for his own escape from the tarnished, damnable wreckage that was his sunken self as he'd sank? It is not difficult to now seduce him. To lose himself in the material heat of another body, in the other's being, in the disconcerting queasiness of his own pleasure whether it be willed or no.

He installs himself between Crozier's legs, negligibly sheltered beneath the writing desk on its spindly legs, more so by the soft width of thigh and the weight of a hand on his head. Crozier strokes Goodsir's hair with tentative motions, the pads of his fingers rubbing in light circles against his scalp, pushing back Goodsir's curls as Goodsir pushes blindly forth, as he takes the flaccid fullness of Crozier into his mouth, eyes shut thereto better display his own eyelashes as hither cry tears, until the fat crown nestles at the entrance to his throat and his nose bumps the coarseness of Crozier's trousers.

It will not soon end or be as ever blissfully over with.

They are both clothed against the cold, the blanket from Crozier's bed and the tent tarpaulin both under Goodsir's knees along with the coat, his own. Those not bare and bony on the cold deck ground. This isn't then.

Slowly he breathes, so that he does not trip the gorge reflex, although spit slicks the stretched corners of his lips, fright spiking sweetly through his arousal as he swallows around the obstruction so accepted and senses the twitch and tension of muscle as Crozier refrains from action. His member pulses, plump, lolling, pate cherished in the palatial press between Goodsir's palate and attentive tongue, but the body never hardens to a rise. The man's hand trembles as it continues to scratch through Goodsir's hair. He praises the hole of him, and extols him as a whole, but Goodsir can no longer hear him.

He's drifting somewhere softer, that is—safer.

* * *

“Oh, I'd almost forgot. Hope you don't mind me borrowing this,” says Hickey, fluttering the pages of Goodsir's journal at him, after having casually removed it from his stolen greatcoat pocket and flicking through them as one might have those of a particularly prepossessing novel that was brought along to serve material for which to read.

It is Goodsir's first night as a mutinous crew's abducted doctor. Of course his tent would offer no respite; he expects none. Nor mercy, either. But it is not unto Hickey's showing of himself as the thief of secrets and the notes on Natsiliŋmiutut vernacular that Goodsir reconsiders his oath to himself not to beg Hickey for anything by any means.

Hickey flips open the journal to a newly dog-eared section. “Must be a burden, keeping that. All to yourself,” he says, trying and failing to catch Goodsir's gaze, unctuous even in potential sincerity. It must have worked with someone—the others, after all, to have putten Goodsir here. To've gotten them to this. Goodsir only lets himself sink into that faraway softness, eyes without focus, and when he ignores all outwith himself it feels the sooner done. Never sooner.

**Author's Note:**

> Inebriated, oblivious rapist (Crozier) performs unwanted oral sex on victim (Goodsir), who doesn't wish ever to enlighten said rapist as to the nature of the interaction, and who thus internalizes his trauma response, to his own detriment. Goodsir nevertheless decides to subsequently initiate a consensual sex scene with a sober Crozier.
> 
> Drinking/drugging (of self) occurs offscreen. Victim's private journal is stolen and its contents therein later used as attempted emotional leverage by everyone's favorite rat.
> 
> Some Anatomical Terms: areola; bosom, breast, chest; body, crown, flesh, member, pate, prick, stand.
> 
> Please inform me of any content warnings you may feel I've oughta include!
> 
> Links  
> -[Dictionar o the Scots Leid](https://dsl.ac.uk/)  
> -[Mind Yer Language? online course playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmk3hiyUEgWl7Qa9pBGN3r94ahQiSXJ2U) bi Michael Dempster  
> -[MindYerLanguage?](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO7FYItwawDAH3_CCDGFjhQ) YT Mainpage  
> -[tusaalanga.ca](https://tusaalanga.ca/)  
> -[uqausiit.ca](https://uqausiit.ca/)  
> 


End file.
